PCI-e Based FPGA Mining Cards

[bluetrepidation]

I'd be interest in a board. I'll keep an eye on this thread.

A.J.

[Bicknellski]

I have 6 spartan6x150's in the mail headed my way to do some testing with.  I have the PCI-e board sketched up on KiCad, and am going to contact a PCB manufacture tomorrow about getting a few made. If all goes well, I'll post the board schematics on here for public use.

For those intrested, DigiKey is selling spartan6x150 singles for $158/chip and $170/chip (same chip, just 2 different batches), just search for "XC6SLX150".

My current board design is PCI-e x16, double wide to fit a wide heatsink and fan in.

I'm also in contact with a rep from Achronix, hoping for a low-ish estimate on their HD1000 series of FPGAs (sub $1,500/chip), but I doubt it.

Thoughts, ideas, opinions?

There are PCI - e FPGA cards are there not already?


http://www.knjn.com/FPGA-PCIe.html

[DarkPunk]

I have 6 spartan6x150's in the mail headed my way to do some testing with.  I have the PCI-e board sketched up on KiCad, and am going to contact a PCB manufacture tomorrow about getting a few made. If all goes well, I'll post the board schematics on here for public use.

For those intrested, DigiKey is selling spartan6x150 singles for $158/chip and $170/chip (same chip, just 2 different batches), just search for "XC6SLX150".

My current board design is PCI-e x16, double wide to fit a wide heatsink and fan in.

I'm also in contact with a rep from Achronix, hoping for a low-ish estimate on their HD1000 series of FPGAs (sub $1,500/chip), but I doubt it.

Thoughts, ideas, opinions?

There are PCI - e FPGA cards are there not already?


http://www.knjn.com/FPGA-PCIe.html

There are, however, they cost $600 for a card with a single Spartan 6.  They card design I have now has 2 Spartan 6's, and is costing me about $450 to make.

[iidx]

You need the LXT version for PCIe, just making sure you know that since you mentioned XC6SLX150 and not XC6SLX150T.

The PCIe core on the Spartan 6 is one lane only, so no need to use all 16 fingers.  You'll also need to ensure that your PCB stackup can handle 2.5 ghz pcie gen 1 speeds.  A lot of trouble to just push a few bits around

I have 6 spartan6x150's in the mail headed my way to do some testing with.  I have the PCI-e board sketched up on KiCad, and am going to contact a PCB manufacture tomorrow about getting a few made. If all goes well, I'll post the board schematics on here for public use.

For those intrested, DigiKey is selling spartan6x150 singles for $158/chip and $170/chip (same chip, just 2 different batches), just search for "XC6SLX150".

My current board design is PCI-e x16, double wide to fit a wide heatsink and fan in.

I'm also in contact with a rep from Achronix, hoping for a low-ish estimate on their HD1000 series of FPGAs (sub $1,500/chip), but I doubt it.

Thoughts, ideas, opinions?

There are PCI - e FPGA cards are there not already?


http://www.knjn.com/FPGA-PCIe.html

There are, however, they cost $600 for a card with a single Spartan 6.  They card design I have now has 2 Spartan 6's, and is costing me about $450 to make.

[gmaxwell]

... I'm really boggling at why someone would be constructing an S6-LX150 based miner right now when the 28nm FPGAs are shipping in volume now.

[DarkPunk]

... I'm really boggling at why someone would be constructing an S6-LX150 based miner right now when the 28nm FPGAs are shipping in volume now.

Just to see if I can.  I'm not doing this because I'm trying to make a product or anything, I'm just a bored dev who has a mobo laying around with 6 pci-e x16 slots.

[Zalfrin]

... I'm really boggling at why someone would be constructing an S6-LX150 based miner right now when the 28nm FPGAs are shipping in volume now.

Buying the previous generation of silicon usually is a nice balancing point between price and performance. Sure the 7 series will be faster, but they're also significantly more expensive. Note, I'm just talking about public pricing, if you get in touch with xilinx sales they might be willing to cut you a deal if you've got enough volume which would make the 7 series more competitive.

[kingcoin]

Why pci-e? You dont need such fast communication, and the cooling is worse than the stand alone pcbs.

Probably because a USB design requires an internal µ-controller as a master. If he uses the PCI-e, he'll use the PC as a master saving some HW design.

I'm interested in this project and may be able to help. Can we see your KiCad sketches?

You can simply use a serial port with a cheap FTDI uart to USB device next to the FPGA. The bandwidth required for mining is nada, PCIe is overkill. You can then use the FTDI driver to access it rather than writing a small PCIe driver.

[kingcoin]

Looking for group buy Stratix V boards to reduce price.

Last time I gave the Stratix V a run through Quartus the performance of Stratix IV was better than the Stratix V. I should try again with a more recent version of Quartus though.

How many cores will you fit in the Stratix V?

[kingcoin]

I don't think you understand.  I'm saying the cost for just the CHIP is $4,515/chip.

That's a lot! Which Stratix V is that?

Did anybody make a chart of #cores/$ and hashrate/$ for the different FPGA's? The Stratix V must be pretty far down on that list.

[tigerfree]

good  luck with your project .